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What is Love? A God, a Celestial Spirit, a state of mind? Or
is it, perhaps, sometimes to be thought of as a God or Spirit and
sometimes merely as an experience? And what is it essentially in
each of these respects?
These important questions make it desirable to review prevailing
opinions on the matter, the philosophical treatment it has
received and, especially, the theories of the great Plato who has
many passages dealing with Love, from a point of view entirely
his own.
Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls;
he also makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the birth of
Eros, under definite circumstances and by a certain parentage.
Now everyone recognizes that the emotional state for which we
make this "Love" responsible rises in souls aspiring to be knit
in the closest union with some beautiful object, and that this
aspiration takes two forms, that of the good whose devotion is
for beauty itself, and that other which seeks its consummation in
some vile act. But this generally admitted distinction opens a
new question: we need a philosophical investigation into the
origin of the two phases.
It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a
tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a
kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. The
vile and ugly is in clash, at once, with Nature and with God:
Nature produces by looking to the Good, for it looks towards
Order- which has its being in the consistent total of the good,
while the unordered is ugly, a member of the system of evil- and
besides Nature itself, clearly, springs from the divine realm,
from Good and Beauty; and when anything brings delight and the
sense of kinship, its very image attracts.
Reject this explanation, and no one can tell how the mental state
rises and where are its causes: it is the explanation of even
copulative love which is the will to beget in beauty; Nature
seeks to produce the beautiful and therefore by all reason cannot
desire to procreate in the ugly.
Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the
beauty found on earth, the beauty of image and of body; it is
because they are strangers to the Archetype, the source of even
the attraction they feel towards what is lovely here. There are
Souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that
in the higher realm and these love the earthly as an image; those
that have not attained to this memory do not understand what is
happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once
there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy the beauty
of earth; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is
sin.
Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether there is Reminiscence
or not; but there are those that feel, also, a desire of such
immortality as lies within mortal reach; and these are seeking
Beauty in their demand for perpetuity, the desire of the eternal;
Nature teaches them to sow the seed and to beget in beauty, to
sow towards eternity, but in beauty through their own kinship
with the beautiful. And indeed the eternal is of the one stock
with the beautiful, the Eternal-Nature is the first shaping of
beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from it.
The less the desire for procreation, the greater is the
contentment with beauty alone, yet procreation aims at the
engendering of beauty; it is the expression of a lack; the
subject is conscious of insufficiency and, wishing to produce
beauty, feels that the way is to beget in a beautiful form. Where
the procreative desire is lawless or against the purposes of
nature, the first inspiration has been natural, but they have
diverged from the way, they have slipped and fallen, and they
grovel; they neither understand whither Love sought to lead them
nor have they any instinct to production; they have not mastered
the right use of the images of beauty; they do not know what the
Authentic Beauty is.
Those that love beauty of person without carnal desire love for
beauty's sake; those that have- for women, of course- the
copulative love, have the further purpose of self-perpetuation:
as long as they are led by these motives, both are on the right
path, though the first have taken the nobler way. But, even in
the right, there is the difference that the one set, worshipping
the beauty of earth, look no further, while the others, those of
recollection, venerate also the beauty of the other world while
they, still, have no contempt for this in which they recognize,
as it were, a last outgrowth, an attenuation of the higher.
These, in sum, are innocent frequenters of beauty, not to be
confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall
into the ugly- for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into
an evil often.
So much for love, the state.
Now we have to consider Love, the God.
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